Patrick Flanery

Ahead of me in line a man starts to cough and the hacking splutters out of control until there is blood on the floor and the guards lead the sick man away. Edward might have been able to tell them whether it was a tubercular cough or a cancerous one. Either way, I suspect the coughing man doesn’t have long. Have you eaten? Edward texts. Have the guards given you anything to drink? 

Yes, a little something, I reply, knowing he’ll see through the lie.

Super long, but moving pretty quick, I reply, and this is only half a lie. The line is long, but it’s not moving quickly.

Most of those waiting are people like us, each hoping for an apartment in a leafy neighborhood. Others are without families—men (usually men) who might be lucky to be assigned a private room in a shared apartment in one of the tower-block circuses ringing the outer suburbs we passed on our way from the airport.

The line is quiet, as if we’re all too exhausted to speak, except I know it’s no longer about exhaustion. Even small talk with a stranger feels like a risk. I imagine exploding in existential despair and being answered by others shouting their own grievances, some in English, some in languages I don’t know, but the guard nearest me, a blonde giant, muscled and tanned, scowls every time one of us makes a noise. When my phone pinged this morning he flinched and reached for his gun. The first time we were here, more than a decade ago, just after Edward and I got together, this city made us feel like we could finally breathe and hold hands in public without worrying. As if we had ever dared to be affectionate with each other in public at home.

We left in late spring but there are days when I’m uncertain if that’s a memory from this year or the year before. There are nights, awake in the shared dormitory room, when I think we might have spent many months in transit. I used to believe the kind of future we find ourselves in did not happen to people like us. Now that it’s the future we inhabit, I feel ashamed by my failure of imagination.

At noon the guards distribute sandwiches and bottles of water, boxes of juice, paper cups of coffee, like a squad of heavily armed flight attendants. Do they think we might be violent? Edward says no one trusts anyone now, even in a country like this. When we visited all those years ago, we indulged in a fantasy of quitting our jobs and moving here to live without having to worry about guns or lockdowns or the random violence that had already by then become such an unremarkable facet of daily life in the place we used to call home without thinking that home would ever decide to refuse us.

An hour after the sandwiches I arrive at the head of the line to find a room full of young men and women sitting at desks with computers. Around the perimeter guards patrol, glowering as if expecting one of us to do something insupportable. To cough blood on the uncovered face of a healthy citizen. To be histrionic or make too much noise, demand more than our due. Our countries have told us we are due nothing, not even air to breathe or ground to stand on, not even the dignity of being left alone. 

The woman at the desk where I sit does not make eye contact. Because I don’t speak her language, we proceed in English. 

Hello, Sam. You are a single man or a family?

I have a family. Me, my husband, Edward, and our three children.

You have passports for everyone? Can I see them?

I pull all our documents from the breast pockets of my jacket. The woman places each passport on a scanner and stares at her computer screen.

You are lucky to have these. No passports these days, no luck.

We got a flight out before people like us stopped being able to move freely. Our accounts were frozen just a few hours after my husband bought the plane tickets.

The woman does not look at me, stares at her screen, her mouth pursing in sympathy.

That’s a shame. I mean, if it were not so skilled, so specialized, you might find jobs sooner. But now you’ll need to retrain. There will have to be some examinations, equivalencies and so on. I assume you will need language classes? 

Yeah, I know how unlikely that is. But I can’t bring myself to laugh.

So you find no work yet? You understand you may work now. There is no waiting period.

I’ve tried to find a job, but no one seems to want a guy who can’t speak the language.

They’re in the school here at the center, but it’s super crowded.

And I see the smallest is too young. Which of you is looking after her?

Of course, I didn’t mean— The young woman keeps her eyes fixed on the computer.

She looks surprised, as if no one has asked her this question in a long time. 

Adela. She says her name without looking away from the screen. Ah, just a moment...

Then she blushes, as if she thinks I might be flirting. Perhaps in this country it’s inappropriate to ask such a personal question on first meeting, or maybe she’s blushing
because she feels uncomfortable around men like me, or even because she finds me attractive. Self-flattery. How shameful. Who could find me attractive in my current state? I look fifty rather than forty. Not even my husband finds me attractive any more. 

After a minute Adela looks up. This is the first moment we make eye contact, and I can see that she’s trying to be helpful, but is also very tired. It’s almost five o’clock. Her eyes are bloodshot. She’s probably dehydrated, not sleeping well. She was born with a cleft lip. If the fluorescent light hadn’t caught the scar at just the right angle I might not have noticed it. The word cicatrix comes into my head, flying from the same sector of memory as cockatrice. In the state that I’m in, I don’t know which of the words is the right one.

There is now a new scheme, Adela says, lisping, as if the cleft lip might have been accompanied by a cleft palate, also corrected early in childhood. Just today it becomes available. I’m not sure this is something you want, but one of our national companies, Tekla, it sells furniture and homewares, also electronics, they have very large stores, like some giant warehouses, and there are, um, I try to think how to describe this. There are like little apartments made up for people to see how things could be arranged in their own homes. The government makes a public-private partnership with Tekla to resettle some families on a temporary basis in their stores. We put no more than five families in each one, and the stores are so big you will not be on top of each other. There is a cafeteria and a laundry center for employees. Also a creche. For older children, there is a school they can walk to. I have a vacancy in a store not so far from here. Near a good school.

This sounds like madness, but Adela seems completely sincere.

I don’t understand, forgive me. I’m really tired. Can you explain how this would work? What are the terms?

Your family would be able to live there until you find jobs. In exchange, you would be asked to work some number of hours each week. The store would train you and your husband, if you wanted to split the hours, or just one of you could work if you or your husband wanted to do fulltime language courses or whatever training you might need to get jobs here as a doctor or lawyer. Food is provided and you would have your own space at night, in one of these model apartments, but during the day you have to put everything away, you know, because shoppers will come in.

I think of the center, of continuing to live here indefinitely, sharing a room with another family, a room smaller than the bedroom Edward and I left behind. Perhaps Tekla would not be such a bad alternative. 

Would there be somewhere to lock our things during the day?

Adela hesitates. She scrolls down, reads aloud in her own language, under her breath, finds the phrase she wants, and nods. 

I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but I know what my husband would ask. There’s no other alternative?

Adela inhales and holds her breath. She looks again at her computer. She types. She clicks and exhales. Again her eyes scroll down the screen. She draws her upper lip between her teeth, worrying the place where the two lobes of flesh were stitched together. No, she sighs, no, you see, because you are five, there are fewer choices. There are the tent camps, but me, I would not want myself...I mean it might be okay now, in summer, but in winter? Even with the stoves I think it is hard. 

She looks again at the screen. I do have a one-bedroom apartment ten kilometers from the city center. On a bus route. But this is not so nice a neighborhood, too much crime. 

I didn’t think there was any crime in this country. 

I would not want to live in that neighborhood myself if I had children, but it would
be your own space. Not very nice, but your own. 

The store is not a bad option. Hot food three times a day, guaranteed work. Very clean. Safe neighborhood. Great school.

Yes, although Tekla deducts some of the cost of feeding you and your family from
whatever wages you receive. The government covers the other accommodation costs while your case is processed. It’s still something, and you could try to save. This is not a terrible option. She blushes again, as if remembering an aspect of the situation she had momentarily forgotten, and then adds, almost under her breath, and you realize of course can’t stay here any longer. Your time in the center is up.

I vacillate between the two options. This or that. Left or right. I should phone Edward, but I don’t know how to explain it to him, or perhaps I can’t face the argument I suspect we’ll have if I try. Adela checks her watch.

While the kids play with our roommates’ children, Edward pulls me into the hallway.
His lower lip is jutting out. It’s the same expression I saw when I told him I thought
there was no reason to leave our home, as if he cannot believe my stupidity.

A department store? What were you thinking? 

It’s a furniture store. And it was the best of three pretty bad choices.

I’d rather take the studio in the slum!

A woman who lives in the room next to ours passes and rolls her eyes. Check your privilege, she says. Entitled prick.

What? Why don’t you say that again? Edward calls after her. He’s so angry now that his left eyebrow is twitching.

Edward turns to me, his eyes bugging out. Did you hear that? Why didn’t you say anything? How about a little backup, Sam?

You need to calm down. This country already had a housing shortage before we all arrived. We’re not unique.

Maybe I should have asked Edward to do the negotiations. Maybe he would have pushed and shouted until Adela gave us a house in the suburbs. He’s proved himself capable of looking after our wellbeing in ways that have failed me. If it had been left to me, we would still be at home. By now, the kids would have been placed in foster care and Edward and I – I don’t even want to imagine. It was Edward who understood the urgency of the situation and insisted we leave, Edward who negotiated with the traffickers, Edward who held us all together. What good is a lawyer in the midst of such a crisis? No good at all, is what I’m starting to think. Go with the doctor every time. I am grateful to have one of my own. At least we have no medical problems despite the trauma we each now carry, which marks the body as much as any other wound.

I try to explain to Edward that we’ve had the maximum number of days in the transfer center. While our claim is being processed, we have to work, whatever jobs we can find. This Tekla option is both a home and a job, with some flexibility built in. I don’t see a better choice. 

Two women trailing three kids trudge down the hall having a version of the same argument. David and Tony, the guys we’ve been living with for the last several weeks, are probably planning for their own day in the accommodation line and the choice they’ll have to make for themselves and their two boys. 

Edward turns away from me, hands crossed over his chest. He used to be big, muscular but in three months it seems as though a full third of his mass has evaporated. 

Tekla, not Kmart. We go now. Another family’s waiting downstairs to take our half of the room.

Will is slumped against my arm. Farah pouts as she stares out the taxi window. Marlene is asleep in Edward’s arms. All our belongings, stuffed into six plastic bags, fit in the rear of the minivan taxi. Between a concrete high-rise and a grocery store I spot a swatch of farmland. Imagine walking through clover and wildflowers, try to get lost for a moment in a hike through the country on this late summer evening, a stroll without bags, without having to worry about carrying all your remaining possessions.

Our taxi driver glances at the five of us in his rearview mirror and grumbles to himself. Were we wrong to believe we would be welcome here?

The Tekla store is wedged into a peri-urban arc of land between streets of boxy houses, high-rises, and wheat fields that give way to woods in the distance. Open country is within walking distance. My fantasy of an evening ramble might actually be possible. 

The exterior of the store is green and ivory, as are the ranks of plastic shopping carts. At the store’s entrance a woman with pink hair and pink lacquered fingernails in a green and ivory uniform waves. 

Welcome to Tekla. I am Eva. Please take a shopping cart for your bags. 

After we introduce ourselves and present our passports to confirm our identities, Eva leads us through the sliding front doors and locks them behind her. We won’t be going out in the evenings, not as long as we live at Tekla. Edward stares at me. What? What do you want me to do?

Ahead on the left is the creche, now closed for the night. A moving walkway leads to
the upper floor.

Please push your cart onto the travellator, Eva says.

Edward and the children scuttle ahead while I roll the green and ivory cart onto the moving walkway. The five of us look around as if the idea of retail is as foreign as this country itself, as if we have already forgotten everything that came before the ever-advancing now.

The upper floor is arranged around a pathway that twists and turns, offering only limited vantages. Living rooms and dining rooms and bedrooms and bathrooms appear around corners, but are never completely visible. 

Eva reassures us that in time we’ll find the shortcuts. They go from one side of the path to another, through the model homes and employee areas. Very tricky! I’ll give you a map.

We pass apartments made up in styles suggesting different kinds of families: minimalist young professionals without children; a family with one small child and limited means; a petit-bourgeois family with two kids; a retired couple who seem to be millionaires living in a penthouse. Every apartment has shelves of real books to make the rooms look cozy, as if actual people were living there.

One of the model apartments, the one that looks petit bourgeois, is already occupied by two men who appear to be our age, more or less. Their two children sit on a couch watching a television whose volume is turned low. An old American movie with subtitles is playing, but it doesn’t look like family fare. A dark-haired couple are alone on a balcony in what might be the south of France. The woman, wearing a white gown with a garland of  ivy, kisses the gray-suited man, who resists her at first but gradually submits to her charms. There is a window on one side of the living room, but after a moment I realize it’s just an illusion, the world visible through its glass nothing but a photograph pasted to a wall. Some of the apartments give an illusion of daylight, others of night. The fantasy retired millionaire couple live out the balance of their lives in a land of chrome surfaces and cocktail parties unfolding in a time of permanent night. Two women with a baby seem to be living there now. 

Eva comes to a stop at a cluster of rooms I might describe as haute bourgeois. 

Because there are five of you, you have our largest model.

If Adela was responsible for the choice, she’s done well. Everything is decorated in muted grays and blues, although the rooms open off one another without hallways or corridors. Edward pushes down the handle on one of the bedroom doors. 

. Eva says this as if she suspects Edward might be a little slow. He starts to turn red.

But what about security? What about privacy?

I am sure the other families will respect your privacy. Also, did they tell you at the center that during the day, the model must be open for customers. You can put your things in the employee lockers downstairs. Spend time in the apartment if you like, sit on the couches, watch the television, but people will be shopping, and I have to ask you not to get in their way during store hours. If someone wants to look at the bed or the couch, then maybe you need to get up and let them look. The store gets very, very busy. 

Patrick Flanery

Patrick Flanery

Fiction

Winter 2019 - Double

Model Family